Server-Side A/B Testing - Okay for SEO?
-
Hey Moz Community!
I've been digging into the differences between server-side testing and client-side testing and had a generic question. Is it safe to run server-side A/B testing?
For example, if I want to Split Test the home page of a site and show 50% of my traffic one home page, and show 50% of my traffic a completely different (read: new template, new content, new CTAs, etc) home page, are there any implications to SEO and organic search?
I've spent about five hour researching and from what I can find A/B testing is acceptable as long as you don't show Googlebot different content or run A/B tests on Googlebot. Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, has stated that A/B testing does not impact search rankings. "A/B or split testing or other forms of testing web sites is okay by Google as long as you don't test GoogleBot or don't treat GoogleBot differently."
The biggest concerns for SEO cloaking, so from my understanding, for server-side testing, you'd need to do user-agent based redirection so that Googlebot (or any search bot) gets the normal version of the home page. The bots shouldn't be part of the test. Technically that is cloaking, but intention-wise, we're not trying to be sneaky. I've also read through this article about experimentation from Google developers here.
Am I missing anything here or is there a definitive answer? If we serve a “B” as a different site for user testing, just exclude google bot by user-agent and we’re good? THANKS!
-
Hi,
I wouldn't be worried about this too much, the biggest and smallest sites in the world do A/B testing and most of the big ones run it through the back-end of their site. In all cases you're trying to improve the user experience and make sure they have a better time on your site. I don't worry about this for TNW at least.
-
Hello, my friend.
Good question you got here. Made my brain leftovers to spin.
Anyway, here is my understanding (and I can be completely wrong).
As Google always says, don't treat Google bot differently from human users, also, they say don't play a/b testing on him. At the same time Google Analytics' a/b testing is working like this: when you visit page for the first time, you get "normal" page, than, based on chance of a/b testing, you either gonna stay or be redirected after loading the page (this one is important) to test page. After this you are being assign a cookie, so every recurring visit you are not "played" with testing until test is complete. Then all cookies are removed and everybody is served whatever version of a/b testing "won".
So, putting three hypothesizes above together, my understanding is that Google bot is being treated the same way - it gets "assigned" (or simply served the original) a version of the page on the first visit. This makes sure that there is no confusion by Google which version of tested page to index.
I think as long as you keep this in mind, there won't be any troubles for SEO.
Hope this makes sense and helps you.
Cheers.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Better Graphic Design-Impact on SEO?
Will improving our site's graphic design but keeping identical structure, tags and text result in better Google? Are lower bounce rates greater time spent on a site by visitors rewarded by Google n the form of higher ranking? We are a commercial real estate brokerage firm in Manhattan and plan on making the following changes: -Much larger photos for listings
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kingalan1
-Lighter cleaner design with more open white areas
-Use of more visible fonts
-Better forms
-Potentially less text and more emphasis on product, which in our case are real estate listints. Our existing site: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . com is a bit ordinary and uninviting. The redesign will have a concept similar to
http://www.dernieretage-paris.com/
The theme behind this real estate site is the city itself, which is quite clever and applicable to Manhattan. Our home page as well as other URLs use lots of text. If we reduce text and use more images to make the pages more engaging, will our organic ranking decline? If we reduce text can we compensate by fuller completion of meta tags? Any thoughts???0 -
What are the best practices for server-side A/B testing?
When performing a full-site server-side A/B test, what best practices should you follow to ensure that you're: not cloaking or at least not being shady only showing Google (and other search engines) the version you want them to see (i.e. not the test pages) Thanks in advance!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | vsem0 -
Customer journey / customer drop off
Hi All, I would like to understand how visitors navigate through my site and find out where the main drop out areas are (i.e. what pages / sections of the site do users leave on). I will then be segmenting by mobile, tablet, new visitor, returning etc. to see how the various subsets of users behave. To do this I generally do the following: Identify main sections of the (ecomm) site: homepage, category pages, product pages, cart, checkout 1, checkout 2, checkout x, payment confirmation. For each section above I either use a segment to isolate that section of the site, either by regex or a simple page selector and apply to the Audience >> Overview report and record the resulting session count. OR I filter the Behaviour >> Site Content >> All Pages report to isolate the various site sections and record unique pageviews. I then plot these figures horizontally under a heading for each section of the site representing a flow between the pages of the site with a calculation showing the difference between each section of the site which represents user drop off. Hope that makes sense. What I am interested to know is, do you have any better suggestions to the process laid about above. Do you see any issues with this process?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | datarat1 -
Is "http://whereisthefold.com/" a good tool?
I came across this tool: http://whereisthefold.com/ I would like to add this to my bag of tricks but want to see if anyone has actually taken the time to verify that this tool presents an accurate representation of where things are placed on different screen sizes? I would appreciate any input. Ron
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Ron_McCabe0 -
Which rich snippet is better for SEO ?
Hello guys, I have rich snippet on my blog, actually I have 2 kinds of them... rating star and authorship... both of them apears on google when my site appears on the results... BUT.... just one of them by time. I notice that when someone rating one of my blog post, then in the google results for that post, It will show the stars and not the face of author and vice versa.. So I would like to know about your experience, wich one is better for seo and gain clicks, authorship or star rating ?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | lans27870 -
Optimising /product/ pages for our 15,000 product ecommerce store.
Hi guys! We're constantly working on evolving our /product/ pages on the site, however some times it's pretty easy to get lost in your own mess. Especially when the sites consists of 15,000+ products. So it's pretty painful to handcraft every single page. So I thought I'd jump in here to see if anyone had any suggestions for stuff we're missing, and or should improve? These are product pages: http://www.warcom.com.au/products/9954_draytek-vigor-120-single-port-adsl-122-modem http://www.warcom.com.au/products/49884_warcom-deluxe-double-lcd-monitor-stand---free-shipping There is a few issues we're aware of already.. Negatives: To many links in the left menus. To many links in the footer. Positives: We recently included rich snippets.. We're always testing out colors and styles. We're always testing meta data. Any and all suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | warcom
Paul.0 -
Ideal product page conversion/retention rate for eCommerce sites
Hi SEOmoz-ers, I was wondering if anyone has data regarding product page abandonment rate (% of potential customers that leave the site after seeing product pages) for websites like Overstock, REI or Zappos? As you may know the above mentioned sites do an exceptional job with product pages. It would be helpful to know what some of the leaders in this space are achieving in terms of conversion rate. What is your personal opinion about this? Thanks,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kush_VMI
Kush0 -
Page Title Tags - SEO vs CRO ?
Hi everyone, Thanks to what seems to be a recent(ish) algo change in Google, some of our more targeted deeper pages are ranking for search terms where before only our homepage would rank. This is of course great however I am a little worried that some of the page titles of our internal pages are a little short, for example our main departments (we are an ecommerce store) are titles 'Department Name | Liberty Games' so for example 'Pool Tables | Liberty Games'. I have heard varying reports on what to do with the title tag, I have heard to keep the most relevant keywords to the left of the tag, which we have done, I have also heard that shorter is better. I am just a bit concerned that our tags are looking a little stumpy in the serps alongside other results which are longer (although admittedly a bit keyword stuffed). So (eventually) my question is, will short titles harm my click-through rate ? but are shorter titles better for SEO ? If longer is better are there any recommendations about what I could add to these titles that could potentially help click-throughs and natural rankings ? Many thanks, Stuart
Conversion Rate Optimization | | stukerr1